They Can't All Be Winners, Part 17: Atlanta Hawks

The starless juggernaut remains theoretical, but for a while, it seemed like the Atlanta Hawks might be it. When they were running through an undefeated January, defending them was essentially futile. Sure as winter strips an oak’s leaves, the opposition were going to chase the Hawks around the court, always a pass behind, closing out to one unguarded man after another, until a good shot went up. The offense plied you with Fireball, then asked you to explain the first thirty pages of Ada. It was impossible.

Watching this, from where I was sitting, was less than exciting. A certain kind of basketball fan gets his rocks off on efficiency, but I respect smoothly mechanized shot creation more than I thrill at it. Kyle Korver is a fine player. I refuse to employ any descriptor more effusive than that.

Perhaps what unsettled me about last season’s Hawks was that they seemed, for a while, until they suffered a couple injuries and fell off their furious pace, to be proving an argument that basketball rationalists have been shopping for years: under a certain caliber of coach, if the talent fits together in a precise fashion, a team doesn’t need a focal point to be great. By itself, I think this an interesting idea, something like the NBA’s version of the dream of the self-driving car. When that idea is put into praxis by the Hawks, it unfolds with boringness of a well-played game of solitaire. Such handsome order! It gives me a twitch.

* * *

Here’s a fear that visits me at night like a bat emerging from the fireplace: I’m not cut out for this creative shit. Just because I paid rent doing it for a while doesn’t mean I’m going to be a professional writer for decades. The market is narrow and volatile. The sort of work I’m drawn to isn’t saleable or popular. I am prickly and critical and dismissive. I’m a terrible reporter. I possess all the pretensions and social dysfunctions of a Difficult Artist with one-fifth of the talent it would take to render my flaws tolerable. I am willfully nigh unemployable in a field that doesn’t employ many people in the first place. When I have a job, it is because someone fucked up and hired a loss leader with no cachet. It’s an anomaly; it gets corrected sooner or later.

I have just enough self-awareness to know what I am and the ways I continually thwart myself, but lack the sense to change. Case in point: this is part 17 of a 30-part navel-gazing session that only intermittently stops discussing depression and books I like long enough to be about basketball teams. The audience for it could fit in a middle school gym. I’m doing it for free at a time when my weekly income is $150. I’m hoping it gets traction somehow, that the constraintlessness of the project draws out my best writerly self and someone with hiring powers or a freelance budget says to themselves I need to keep this guy in High Lifes and indoor living. The odds on that second thing are interstate highway long; it is not how you go about reinvigorating a flatlining career. This will almost definitely prove to be an extravagantly stupid, broadly ignored moonshot. I am making a fist around the stove range and hoping that instead of burning me, it gives me superpowers.

Sometimes, as I’m writing, I think about how this project needs to be extraordinary, and isn’t.

* * *

What must it feel like to be so good at something that you can operate beyond convention and win? Star players give us a window into this sensation. Your LeBrons, your Kevin Durants. When they encounter a double-team, they can split it instead of passing. When the lane appears clogged, they can reveal its seams. They can control the pace of the offense, quicken or slow it down depending on their preference. It’s not that they always do this, but that the option is always available to them. If it feels right, they can make what accepted wisdom would deem the wrong play, and make it work. They’re permitted and able to be extraordinary. They’re mind-expanding.

The Hawks, in their starlessness, always try to do what they’re supposed to. That they do this so well is remarkable, but it’s the opposite of inspirational. They’re defined by their system—that word pops up seven times in a not-particularly-long Kevin Arnovitz piece; Zach Lowe uses it five times here—and the plaudit-slathered coach who devises it. From that Arnovitz piece, about Jeff Teague: “[the] point guard position in Atlanta these days demands a complete devotion to the system.” The same is true of every other spot on the floor. The players are bound by Mike Budenholzer’s ideas, obliterated by them.

And that is my problem with the Hawks. They’re a collective of rule-followers, individuals allowing themselves to be subsumed by a larger mechanism. It’s alienatingly beautiful basketball, like a symphony composed by a geometry textbook. I can’t stand it; there is nothing in it for me. The scheme is too rigidly prosaic. At all times, the players are staying within themselves; the team murders the opponent with sensible choices. It’s an excellent way to win games and utterly discouraging at the philosophical level. The Hawks see greatness glimmering in the distance, and they don’t lunge for it. They make a to-do list. They don’t believe there’s any chance they can be extraordinary. They don’t try.

After the Hawks were swept by the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals, bloggers and reporters wondered about Atlanta’s ceiling, if their approach could land them a title, if what looked like a new dawn was in fact a lightbulb blowing out. Will it work? they asked, in so many words. The question is irrelevant. We already know how it will work. The Hawks will operate like great, crashing waves of math. There are shapes that look like faces in those waves. They might illusions.

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